http://www.philly.com/dailynews/loca...rtificate.html

The city, faced with a lawsuit by two landlord associations, agreed two weeks ago to stop enforcing the law until either City Council or the Department of Licenses & Inspections makes changes approved by the property owners

With the landlords having the power to veto any changes by the city...It's an instant win for them.

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As a landlord, I can tell you that a Rental Suitability Certificate is just a piece of paper.

You go online, you fill out a form, you pay $30 through Paypal, and presto - - you've got a Certificate that can be printed out.

It does nothing to improve the quality of life in any of those landlord-hating precincts of the Northeast.

You want to improve quality of life, try something else. Cite people for setting trash out early, for not maintaining their yards, for playing loud rap music, whatever. But this Rental Certificate is just a waste of time.

City Council, in a rare act of stupidity, decided that at the incipience of every tenancy L & I should certify that the unit is habitable, a laudable goal but impossible to enforce unless L & I hired an army of inspectors to check every unit before a tenant moved in. To keep it managable, L & I, which was against this from the start given the logistics, created a self-certifying system, which defeated the entire purpose of the legislation. What we really need in this city is L & I being more responsive to citizens' complaints, and not to punish the good with the bad. Hopefully the new 311 system will hold L & I's feet to the fire. The bad units should be ferreted out, and the good units shouldn't have to go through some insulting process. It's like when you call the gas company (215 235 1000) and you have to listen to two minutes worth of stupidity about what to do if you are not paying your gas bill; the good customers are punished along with the morons which we are subsidizing.

PS I just called pgw and they thankfully changed their protocol.

The underlying issue is that Mayor Nutter is continuing his policy of picking and choosing what laws he thinks he should follow and enforce.

Didn't he just call out Abraham for choosing not to enforce his illegal gun laws?

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Right now there is an agreement allowing foreclosures to continue but presenting all kinds of help for owner-occupants who are in over their heads, agreed to by all parties. Remedies include modifying loan terms. I believe Philly's program is a national model. Don't be so rigidly inflexible; would you rather these so-called homeowners be forced to honor the contracts they signed? The law is an approximation of what is right and what is wrong, and needs to be interpreted, and sometimes even bent when all parties agree to it. It is NOT the word of God.

Completely different.

Someone in contract with another person can choose not to enforce their rights of the contract.

Nutter is the executive branch of government. Legislation is not merely a recommendation.

What if a mayor of the city you lived in thought vandalism was really an art form and chose not to enforce vandalism laws when your house was spray painted?

Law should not be arbitrary between branches of government.

Not to mention the fact he voted for it too.

As for homeowners and banks honoring the contracts they signed? Yes, if I had to pick between letting everyone off or holding people to what they agree on, I would say they need to honor their contracts ... at the same time banks should eat the losses they end up with by foreclosing on a loan for a property they inflated the appraisal on.

Both sides should lose out and both sides should learn.

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Philadelphia is not suffering from the foreclosure crisis. It's like what... a couple foreclosures a week?

When it goes up to 80 a week, then it would be trouble.

Believe it or not, if you only look at the City in SFHs, there's not a lot of ARMs that was written; not like in Boston or down in the sunbelt. Some Alt-A activity as 3rdandBrown mentioned in another thread I read (the sick housing thread I think), but nowhere near the levels of ARM activity as seen places like South Jersey along the store and some affluent areas of Jersey.


The most ARM activity that's happened in Philadelphia the last time I looked at an Inquirer map have been areas that we now consider "the hood", like Southwest Philadelphia and some parts of North Philly. These were homes already relatively inexpensive to begin with and folks with very poor credit jumped on the opportunity to finance into homes so they could gain homeowner status. Some of those ARMs were written fairly recent so the reset activity isn't noticeable here.

Big plus for Philly: If a bunch of condos goes to foreclosed it's no big deal--they drop in price but not to the point where a condo tower turns into a project tower. You don't have to really worry about a foreclosed unit on your floor [other than checking to make sure building maintenance hasn't let a homeless guy or a punk into the unit to sleep there], it's just an "empty hotel room" basically, for all intents and purposes.


I don't know about ARM activity in the suburbs other than I know there was a lot of it going on in Bucks and parts of Delco. But the city itself is actually holding up rather well. What we need to make sure happens here is that we stop the slowdown in jobs in town and get back to positive job growth, and even make our city attractive to people who want to leave the suburbs and come back into the city--which there's still plenty of interest in people doing that in the DelVal.

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Buh-bye.

Correct

http://www.philly.com/philly/busines...U_S__rate.html

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I think city council should pass legislation to ban unsafe properties.

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Welcome to Philadelphia. Here's how you can help us make our great city even better:

• Write to your state and local elected officials
• Report suspicious activity to the police department

But it has, its called the building code. I know you are being sarcastic.

The problem is enforcement, as it always is, and the arbitrary if not explicitly patronage driven performance (or lack thereof) by L&I. Nothing in the law is a terrible burden on landlords if L&I could be trusted to be consistant, unbiased and quick and efficient to deal with. The problem is it can't and so the landlord groups are intent on blocking legislation for fear of the reasonable sounding requirement turning into yet another Kafka-esque struggle with Philly bureaucracy.

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Barack Obama on security, Iraq and Afghanistan. We need a Commander in Chief who knows the differences between Shii'a and Sunni.